My apologies if we've been getting into a flame war. I'd advise you to be careful about calling people "noobs". It's very demeaning.
MAN I wish I knew that feature wasn't support in Linux
before I bought the card. I feel like such a schmuck for not doing my research.
So what I've come to understand is that my tearing problem is related to the fact that I'm using a compositor, whether it be Kwin or Compiz.
(If any ATI developers out there are listening) My wishlist for improved features would be:
*Vsync that
works when a compositor is enabled.
*GPU-accelerated video playback. I know I know, modern CPUs can do just fine. But it's nice to know that my beast of a card is being put to good use (that's what I bought it for, right

) and my CPU can happily process other tasks.